Xerox PARC — Where it all Began
When we talk about the Personal Computer revolution we can’t leave out the major influence of Xerox PARC. Founded in 1970, their vision was to fund an innovation park on the west coast (Palo Alto) for design and research of the next generation technological machines and ideas. Known to many as a laser printing company, Xerox was actually the inventor of the first personal computer, Xerox Alto.
Many current high tech company campuses have inherited features from Xerox PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) such as, an open working space and a flat organizational style which at the time were worlds apart from Xerox’s East Coast headquarters office culture. Xerox Parc launched many legendary careers, some of whom became giants in different industries, a few even amassing astounding wealth. Alan Kay, a particularly successful former Xerox Parc employee is best known for his invention of the modern graphical user interface (GUI) as well as his famous quote:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Smalltalk: One of the Earliest Object-Oriented Programming Languages
In the 1960s Ivan Sutherland wrote one of the most influential computer programs, Sketchpad, which enabled users to “talk” to a machine using a “light-pen”, the predecessor of the mouse. This new type of interaction and communication with machines inspired Alan to see the future and want to invent a newer one.
Though Sketchpad was the invention of modern interactive computer graphics, however it had a critical challenge that since Sketchpad was using an abstract language and logic that were critical to programmers made the computers only accessible to limited users.
Programming languages at that time could be categorized in a number of ways: imperative, applicative, logic-based and problem-oriented. SmallTalk was one of the earliest Object-oriented programming languages (24 years earlier than Javascript). Often, cultural environments and the development of technology are intertwined with each other. After the cold war and the Vietnam war, scientists, activists, hobbyists, and hackers believed that the computer is the medium to give power to the people, decentralize information and put technology into the hands of individuals. The hippie movement, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the antiwar protests paired with technological advances like microprocessors boosted the birth of Personal Computer. As Lee Felsenstein, one of the computer engineers who played a central role in the Personal Computer development, put it:
“We wanted there to be personal computers so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or corporate.”
Alan Kay’s accessible to all approach encouraged nonspecialists to contribute and join the computer revolution march. User Interface or User Experience were still unknown at the time and wouldn’t be a familiar term until the invention of Macintosh more than a decade later.
“Though it has noble ancestors indeed, Smaltalk’s contribution is a new design paradigm-which I called object-oriented — for attacking large problems of the professional programmer, and making small ones possible for the novice user. Object-oriented design is a successful attempt to qualitatively improve the efficiency of modeling the ever more complex dynamic systems and user relationships made possible by the silicon explosion.”
Alan’s accessible to all approach encouraged nonspecialists to contribute and join the computer revolution march. User interface or User experience were still unknown until the invention of Macintosh which is more than a decade later.
Dynabook, A Tablet for Kids
Dynabook was a precursor of the iPad, designed 38 years before the release of the first iPad. The Dynabook, was targeted to kids — “A Personal Computer for Children for All Ages.”. This portable computer was to be no larger than a notebook and lighter than 4 pounds. Dynabook had a clear product goal, it was not for “saving the world” but for encapsulating centuries of human knowledge and delivering it to the next generation, as it is partially named as “book”.
There are a lot of UX related points in Alan Kay’s paper on Dynabook, in which he stated a clear product goal, user personas, user journeys, key requirements and a touch of user interface. In one chapter Alan talked about the font display in Dynabook, that was carefully considered in order for users to achieve character print quality similar to papers with comfortable reading distance. They ran multiple different fonts, font size, spacing, ect. Experiments to make reading on the device as natural as possible.
Unfortunately, the technology for Dynabook was not ready to be put into production, therefore, instead, Alan proposed an interim version, later known as “Xerox Alto”.
In Marshall McLuhan’s book “Media: The Extensions of Man”, he writes how media is not only a middle man of transmitting information, the media itself can reshape a human’s behavior and its society. All forms of media can engage viewers in different ways. Pioneers like Alan Kay made computers approachable for non-technical people, we, traditionally just viewers — are have now also become content creators.
A special Thanks to Amelle Stein for taking her time to give me detailed feedbacks!
